Cases often don’t meet my high requirements. Many cases are sharp-edged, bad designed (inside and outside), use cheep plastic, and/or vibrate, because the hard drives confer their vibration to the case. The Sugo SG02-F case is not perfect, but I will recommend it. The Silentium T11 case has no shard edges, but I won’t recommend it. Too much plastic and optical not appealing.

You probably have to replace the boxed CPU heat sink and use a better power supply if you want a silent system.

How well do these components work with Ubuntu 10.10 (and probably other recent GNU/Linux distributions)? Perfectly. Everything that I tested worked:

The USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports work with everything plugged in (mouse, keyboard, flash drives).

Audio works (only stereo output tested; 5.1 sound was available in Pulseaudio)

2D and 3D graphics work with the free (libre) radeon driver (Compiz runs)

Post navigation

10 thoughts on “Hardware review I”

I can recommend Antec Titan 650-EC. I bought it primarily to build a 5-disk RAID but it turned out to be very well made. The only issue is with the front-door that is hard to fix back at times but it does not bother much.

can you tell me if it runs debian squeeze?….. i have been looking at that asrock mother board for a “new” computer and haven’t had much luck finding out if it works….out of the box,,,as it were……i.e. if it requires $R%#$@$# non-free “DFSG” software

Sorry, I don’t have access to the hardware anymore. I built the computers for someone else.

I didn’t have to install non-free “DFSG” stuff to get the hardware working. I assume that Debian squeeze runs on it. You may have to install firmware-linux-nonfree and upgrade the kernel. Ubuntu 10.10 uses linux 2.6.35. Debian squeeze uses linux 2.6.32.